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“He can follow the guidelines of High Holiness the Dalai Lama,” the 44-year-old's posters promise.

“He has worked for Tibet's planning commission and besides this, he has a visa for America but he has stayed in India to serve the (Tibetan) government. He has a lot of experience and sincerity.”

When it comes to campaigning for the upcoming parliamentary election of the Tibetan government-in-exile, this is as clear an election platform as you are likely to find.

In five months, on March 20, some 79,000 registered Tibetan voters around the world will head to the polls to elect a prime minister and 44 members of parliament.

Western scholars call the upcoming election a milestone in the exiled government's history.

For decades, the Dalai Lama has served both as Tibet's spiritual and political leader. But with the 75-year-old in a period of self-described semi-retirement, the Tibetan government-in-exile is poised to play a more prominent role in negotiations with China.

Yet there are concerns about whether the exile government is ready to handle the added responsibility.

Critics worry that Tibet's exile government is woefully unsophisticated and unprepared for a showdown with China and an unofficial survey of the hundreds of political posters in Dharamsala, a north Indian mountain village that serves as the capital of Tibet's exile government, seems to support this theory. Shoepel's was among the most compelling campaign pitches.

A fellow in the Tibetan Studies Initiative at Stanford University, 61-year-old Tenzin Tethong is running to head the kalon tripa, the Tibetan exile government's eight-member cabinet. He agreed that the young democracy has struggled to find its footing.

“It's a work in progress,” he says.

Tibet's exile government holds two sessions a year. One is in March and a second is in September. Both are just 15 days.

This year, the government passed a single piece of legislation, a new law that gives exiles in North America two parliamentary seats instead of one.

The government raises money by charging Tibetans in India a 2 per cent tax on earnings. Overseas Tibetans pay $84 a year to receive voting privileges, said Jampal Chosang, the government's chief electoral officer.

Samdhong Rinpoche (Rinpoche is an honorific for a senior lama) has served as the exile government's first prime minister for the past eight years and his stewardship has been laced with controversy. He has infuriated some young Tibetans by calling the Tibetan issue a domestic matter for China and earlier this year, he risked widening a rift among the estimated 120,000 exiled Tibetans when he ridiculed those who want the Dalai Lama to stop asking China for autonomy and instead demand Tibet's independence.

In a May 23 speech in New York, Rinpoche said people who push independence “criticize and denigrate his holiness. All these people are a bit more dangerous than the Chinese communists.”

Elliott Sperling, a Tibetan scholar at Indiana University, said Samdhong Rinpoche's Tibetan democracy has missed out on opportunities to mature. The Dalai Lama hasn't helped matters, he said.

“In public, it's impossible for people to criticize the Dalai Lama's middle-way approach with China,” Sperling said. “It's very difficult to have a real democracy if the leader is out of bounds and people don't understand that criticizing him is their very basic right.”

Similarly, Sperling said the Dalai Lama could be showing parliament more leadership by establishing a search committee now to find his eventual successor. When the 75-year-old Dalai Lama does die, it's widely expected that China will announce its own Dalai Lama.

“There's no doubt that there's going to be a scramble for power,” Sperling said.

Sitting in a coffee shop in Dharamsala, a few feet away from the entrance to the Dalai Lama's temple, several monks mused on a recent evening over the Dalai Lama's eventual death and the power vacuum it would create.

Thubten Gyatso, the 13th Dalai Lama, was 57 when he died a week before Christmas in 1933.

Mourners prepared his corpse in the traditional way: The Buddhist monk's body was boiled in yak butter and salt and his mustachioed face was painted with gold. His corpse was transported to a temple in the Tibetan capital city Lhasa where it was seated upright while his soul, Buddhists believe, journeyed to nearby Lake Chö Kor Gye to take up temporary residence.

It was four years before the current Dalai Lama was discovered living with his parents in a poor Tibetan mountain settlement and decades after that before he became a respected world leader.

“I don't think there's any question that when His Holiness dies, China will say the game is over,” a 25-year-old monk from Nepal whispered in the crowded café.

And with China likely declaring victory, several high-profile Tibetan advocates said it's a safe bet that violence in Tibet, sporadic to this point, would increase.

“Freedom is not nice and cool all the time,” said Tenzin Tsundue, an activist who lives in Dharamsala. “Of course there may be more setting fires.”

While China has argued that the foreign press doesn't understand the Tibetan issue and has said the exile government doesn't appreciate its efforts to bring prosperity to the region, more young Tibetans are becoming restive, said Jamyang Norbu, an acclaimed Tibetan writer who now lives in the U.S.

In March 2008, Tibet was paralyzed by a string of riots in Lhasa that left as many as 140 protestors dead. While the city has taken on a more militarized look, with numerous closed-circuit TV cameras, the prospect of violence remains.

Even now, Norbu said some Tibetans in Lhasa are stockpiling AK-47s that they buy on the black market from Chinese police.

The going price for one AK is two lumps of musk, he said. Extremely rare and expensive, musk comes from the gland of a male musk deer and is used to make perfumes.

“People are realizing the Dalai Lama's way is not getting us anywhere,” Norbu said. “He has no idea how sophisticated the Chinese apparatus is.”

It may be a young democracy, but Tibet's exile government doesn't lack political intrigu

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